Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Early Vote + Mail Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

These are the raw numbers for ballots sent to mail voters, ballots receieved, and early votes that were accepted.

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
119,519 63,345 53.00% 230

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Overall Early and Mail Vote Compared to 2016

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters and Received by State

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting Totals Per House District.

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. Here are the raw totals of votes in each Alaska House District.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Mail Ballots Received Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected Early Vote in Person
28 South Anchorage 3368 6196 5 906
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 2592 4445 14 245
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 2570 5036 9 1190
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 2497 4614 7 766
21 West Anchorage 2404 4341 6 798
27 Anchorage - Basher 2385 4115 5 628
26 Anchorage - Huffman 2263 4319 6 687
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 2230 4054 1 599
20 Anchorage - Downtown 2084 3746 6 858
25 Anchorage - Abbott 2045 3850 5 647
18 Anchorage - Spenard 2028 3700 17 736
34 Mendenhall Valley 1969 4084 9 1705
31 Homer/South Kenai 1932 4177 11 17
04 Western Fairbanks 1900 3511 3 980
16 Anchorage - College Gate 1861 3403 7 512
35 Sitka/Petersburg 1775 3275 10 15
17 Anchorage - University 1675 3141 3 584
23 Anchorage - Taku 1609 3023 10 531
12 Chugiak/Gateway 1599 3033 7 806
29 North Kenai 1527 3053 4 20
11 Greater Palmer 1514 2697 13 1235
10 Rural Mat-Su 1496 2778 2 803
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 1411 2715 5 824
30 Kenai/Soldotna 1409 2784 9 6
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 1402 2667 3 166
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 1396 2580 5 598
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 1394 2410 1 207
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 1237 2241 5 920
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 1184 2207 8 3
07 Greater Wasilla 1148 2280 4 1277
01 Downtown Fairbanks 1132 2141 3 580
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 1126 2172 4 290
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 1122 2356 4 14
15 Elmendorf 1086 2209 7 292
03 North Pole/Badger 860 1696 3 449
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 791 1500 1 346
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 538 1195 5 14
38 Lower Kuskokwim 299 653 0 5
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 245 527 2 184
40 Arctic 206 541 1 9
99 NA 36 54 0 0

Mail Voting Relative to Voter Registration and Voter Turnout per House District

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout.

This is not really finished yet. Also I just made up the regional labels.

Partisan Explanation on Vote by Mail

This looks at the relationship between relative vote-by-mail activity and voting results from the 2016 presidential election. The y axis is the percentage of mail votes returned relative to the total 2016 turnout. The x axis and color is the margin by which Donald Trump won or lost the district in 2016. The basic trend you see is that the redder the disrict, the less vote-by-mail there is, so far. The key exception is western Alaska (in the lower left), which voted for Clinton but is not seeing much vote-by-mail participation yet.

Voting Method Breakdown by House District

Mail and Online Rejections Per House District

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.